Search results for Compiling Your Own Kernel

Tutorial quote: Gensplash is a project started by Spock whose aim is to create a set of tools which could enrich the Gentoo boot process by displaying messages, animations, progress bars, etc. An explanation of the various things named *splash (bootsplash, gensplash, fbsplash, and splashutils) and how they relate to each other, can be found at Spock's Gensplash site.

Fbsplash is part of the gensplash project. According to fbsplash's documentation, "the framebuffer splash is a kernel feature that allows displaying a background picture on selected consoles and switching the first console to the so-called silent mode, while booting/rebooting/shutting down the system." The fbsplash device is accessed through the /dev/fbsplash device node. For fbsplash to work, a frame buffer device is required.

Tutorial quote: My entry into systems programming was guided by my desire to understand further the operating systems I was working with daily as a contract UNIX and, later, Linux system administrator. The result of this was ifchk, a packet sniffer detector I wrote in C and released in June of 2003. ifchk initially was written under IRIX and then ported to Linux, mostly under the 2.4 kernel. The current ifchk revision, beta 4, recently was released and beta 5 is on the way.

My work on ifchk has allowed me to examine programmatically several areas of operating system functionality. Examples include the Linux netlink(7) and rtnetlink(7) facilities, device control--that is, network interfaces--via ioctl(2), signals and proc, the process filesystem. Proc and its ability to display a wide array of data concerning the runtime state of a system are the focus of our discussion here.

Tutorial quote: After the last article was published, I have received more than a dozen requests for a second filesystem benchmark using the 2.6 kernel. Since that time, I have converted entirely to XFS for every Linux machine I use, so I may be a bit bias regarding the XFS filesystem. I tried to keep the hardware roughly the same. Instead of a Western Digital 250GB and Promise ATA/100 controller, I am now am using a Seagate 400GB and Maxtor ATA/133 Promise controller. The physical machine remains the same, there is an additional 664MB of swap and I am now running Debian Etch. In the previous article, I was running Slackware 9.1 with custom compiled filesystem utilities. I've added a small section in the beginning that shows the filesystem creation and mount time, I've also added a graph showing these new benchmarks. After the first round of benchmarks, I received a sleuth of e-mails asking for the raw numbers. The numbers are now included in tables at the end of this e-mail for both the last and current set of benchmarks.